Penumbra
by Punctuator
Summary: A grim what-if. The Icarus I is calling, but our intrepid crew isn't stopping. That doesn't necessarily translate to a happy ending. Rated for language, madness, and ethically questionable decisions.
1. Chapter 1

**PENUMBRA**

She was right there. In astronomical terms, and as compared to the millions of miles they'd already traveled, the _Icarus I_ was close enough to touch. She was broadcasting an automated distress signal. Her engines were off-line, but her hull was intact. More importantly, at least in the opinion of her sister-ship's physicist, her payload was intact, too.

But then the decision-- _Do we stop or don't we?_-- went to a vote, and Capa lost. Searle had started in with a line of what the others obviously perceived as nonsense about how Capa should be the one to make the call, about how Capa, as their resident bomb-master, was best qualified to decide whether they should try to acquire the payload from the _Icarus I_. Capa mostly agreed with him, past a niggling sense that this was a decision he'd just as soon not have to make.

So the others, sensing his hesitation, had made the decision for him. Kaneda, whose mistrust of Searle had grown in direct proportion to their doctor's self-inflicted skin damage from his solar-viewing sessions in the observation room, had informed Searle curtly that Capa's was not the only opinion at play here. Mace, his expression roughly relieved, had backed Kaneda while splitting an openly contemptuous stare between the doctor and Capa. "You're right," he said to their captain, while the statement's obverse echoed silently in Capa's ears: _And you're fucking wrong._

Capa had looked from him to Trey, who looked openly relieved but who refused to meet his eyes, and then at Cassie, who looked back at him levelly. Supportively, he'd thought--

"It would be an unjustifiably dangerous maneuver," she said. "I'm opposed to it."

Before he could stop himself, Capa said: "I can understand you're afraid--"

He never had a chance. To finish, that is. Either then or, as it turned out, later.

"Fuck you," Cassie hissed.

"Cass-- All I'm saying is--"

The room narrowed down to them, just the two of them, and in narrowing seemed to catch and then to crush his heart. He'd never seen her angry; he'd never dreamed she could _be_ this angry.

"Do you know the first thing about docking these ships, Capa?" she snapped. "I don't think you do. And you've got the fucking balls to say _I'm_ afraid--?"

"Cassie." The others were looking at them now, at him and at her. Capa felt his cheeks go hot. "Jesus Christ, I only--"

"She said 'no,' Capa." Mace turned to Kaneda. "So we're not stopping."

"No, we're not." Kaneda had his eyes on Capa; Capa knew him well enough to recognize that Kaneda was disappointed in him: they had a mission-- that much was plain to anyone with an ounce of pragmatism or intelligence-- and the one among them who lived more in theory than in reality, that being Capa, had openly advocated deviating from that mission for a bad risk, a remarkably unsound chance. "However-- Trey?"

"Yes, sir?"

"Calculate an alternate trajectory for our return voyage. If our payload doesn't succeed, perhaps we can rendezvous with the _Icarus I_ on our way out. Take her payload and, if necessary, her reserve fuel stores." He asked Capa: "Is that acceptable to you, Dr. Capa?"

"Yes, Captain."

"It better be acceptable, you little shit," Mace muttered. "Goddamn geek moron--"

"That's enough, Mace," Kaneda said, as Capa bristled.

"Yes, sir." The meeting over, the mission safe, Mace headed for the entrance to the mess hall. He looked back, caught Cassie's eye. "You coming, Cass?"

"Yeah." For just a second, she looked at Capa. Her eyes were as dark as naked ice at night on a frozen lake, and just as clear and cold. Then she followed Mace out of the room.

* * *

Capa went back to the payload. Dinnertime approached; he wasn't hungry. Just after eighteen hundred hours, the lights flickered for a moment. He paused. The lights steadied again. He kept working.

* * *

The first thing he noticed when he left the payload at twenty-two hundred hours was the smell. Someone had burned something in the galley. Meat, by the odor. Maybe a chunk of packaging had caught fire, too.

He asked, moving aft along the long spindle of a corridor leading from the payload back to the ship's residential areas: "_Icarus,_ aren't the air filters working?"

_Air filtration is functional, Capa. Filtering residual smoke now._

Capa paused. "Residual smoke from what, _Icarus_?"

_Event, eighteen hundred hours, sixteen minutes: Fire, originating in galley, spreading to common area and Comms. Extinguished at eighteen hundred hours, eighteen minutes, by automated containment system. Damage to comms systems. Estimated casualties: four. Known fatalities: three._

By now Capa wasn't listening. He was running for the galley.


	2. Chapter 2

Their external communications were gone, their internal communications spotty. Which accounted, possibly for _Icarus _being wrong-- largely, though, to no thanking of God: she'd misread the biometrics coming from the blast scene. Trey, uncharacteristically absent from the galley, had survived relatively unscathed: a blow to his skull from a dropping fire-containment panel in the corridor outside the mess and a subsequent lungful of acrid smoke had laid him flat. And two were dead, not three: Harvey and Searle, on cooking duty, had died instantly, or so their injuries suggested, when one tiny electrical spike struck like steel off a flint against the heat of the flat-top range and sparked off a pocket of gas trapped in a design-flaw bend in the range's venting system; but the lanyard on which Corazon hung her commlink had burned through when the outrush of flame from the galley hit her. Deprived of the readings from that commlink and receiving no verbal acknowledgment that clearly answered the question

_Corazon, are you alive?_,

_Icarus_ had assumed, as Capa did, when he first knelt beside the botanist's horrifically burned body there in the passthrough between the galley and the mess hall, that Corazon was dead.

* * *

The good ship and her resident physicist-- who, to his shame, had reeled back in horror and then vomited a moment later when, Corazon, touched, had opened her eyes and shrieked in pain-- might have avoided the assumption by waiting one hundred and eight hours: five days after the fire, Akira Kaneda administered to the botanist of the _Icarus II_ a fatal dose of painkiller.

* * *

Their captain acted less than efficiently: in trying to euthanize the woman for whom he'd never declared his love, he broke three of the four bottles of Lethanol on board the _Icarus II._ His hands, understandably, moved spastically, nerve endings unaccustomed to light and air doing their best to retreat from this new overload of sensation, from the raw clarity of agony. Three wrist-flicks, three finger-quakes, three bottles toppling to and then smashing on the polished metal deck in Medical. He apologized to Corazon for his ineptitude as he injected her with the contents of the fourth bottle; he continued gently to murmur to her words even _Icarus_ with her microphones and cameras, the depth of data banked like a cold black ocean in her mainframe, could not translate, as Corazon's eyes became thankful and then unseeing. When Capa and Trey found their captain sitting amongst the shards of broken glass and splashes of painkiller on the deck beside Corazon's bed, the syringe still gripped tight in his burned fingers, he apologized to them, too.

* * *

This was two days after the deployment. The one and only, the successful deployment. The saving of the world. Which Capa and Trey had watched from the flight deck as the ship retreated from the sun, Capa in the pilot's chair, Trey beside him in the co-pilot's seat. An outrushing of luminescence that spelled life for everyone and everything they'd left behind on Earth.

Capa had wondered then, watching as the light he'd created spilled through the cameras angled forward, through the ship's huge domed shield, if by touching that light and the heat behind it he would feel anything. He doubted it.

"I'm invulnerable," he'd murmured.

"Immortal--?" Trey queried, possibly not hearing correctly. He looked at Capa, his brows arched, questioning, but Capa only shook his head and lounged bonelessly into the pilot's seat.

* * *

Now, these three days later, he could feel again. Tears burned the backs of his eyes as he looked at the monitor providing the feed from Medical. He and Trey had made sure of that, that one image at least, after what had happened to Corazon. Kaneda, Cassie, and Mace were in their cots. Capa fixed his gaze on their captain.

"How could he do it?"

Trey looked over from the co-pilot's seat, saw where Capa was looking. "You saw her. You treated her. She was dying, Capa."

Capa merely asked again: "How could he do it?"

Trey said: "He loved her."

"No." Capa shook his head. "You couldn't do that to someone you loved. You couldn't do that to-- to--"

"To--?" Trey echoed softly.

Capa pushed up out of the chair. For a long moment, he stared down at Trey with open, cold fury. Trey looked back at him, his expression compassionate, infinitely reasonable. Capa hated him.

He left the flight deck, headed for Medical.

* * *

Kaneda knew Capa sometimes let him win at chess. He had to know. He suggested a game after Capa finished cleaning the worst of his burns. His breath hissed, bubbling and wet, past his cracked lips.

"No quarter," he said, hoarsely. "Not today, Robert." Capa flinched slightly, caught out. He thought Kaneda smiled. "Beat me as soundly as you can."

They played. Capa played from exhaustion and sorrow, Kaneda from pain. The game lingered on. One hour, two. Capa sat hunched on one of the steel chairs beside the captain's bed. When his head nodded toward the board, Kaneda gently touched his forearm. Capa sat up sharply. Disoriented, he felt fresh horror at the sight of Kaneda's face. But the captain's eyes were clear and affectionate.

"Go. Rest."

Capa could hear agony in the man's every rattling breath.

"I can wait," Kaneda said.

* * *

He couldn't stay awake forever. Out of fear of missing the deadline for deployment, he hadn't slept. Then, in the maelstrom of caring for the injured, interring the deceased in the ship's mortuary freezers, he'd remained awake. On the sixth day following the deployment, on the advice of his captain and out of sheer physical necessity, Capa staggered into his cabin and collapsed on his bed.

Kaneda went missing as he slept.

* * *

Capa stared at the empty cot. Crustings of blood and pus on the sheets. The chess board knocked sideways on the wheeled cart, a scattering of pieces on the cot and on the floor. "Where is he, Trey?"

"How should I--" Trey frowned in response to the desperation, the accusation, broadcast in Capa's expression. "I don't know, Capa. I might have dozed off--" His eyes widened. "God, you don't think I--"

He left the question unfinished. Capa left it unanswered.

"We need to find him, Trey," he said.

* * *

They did. Kaneda was seated in the main airlock, on the far side of the white chamber's thick inner door. Rattled though she was, damaged though she might be, _Icarus_ had protected her human captain: she'd not allowed the outer hatch to open.

But she hadn't prevented him manually from voiding the chamber's air into space.

_She hadn't prevented __**someone**__,_ Capa thought.

* * *

"He wouldn't do this. He wouldn't kill himself," he said, as he and Trey carried Kaneda's body back to Medical. He was panting or quietly hyperventilating, and he intoned the words like a creed for an honorable man now dead.

"Obviously, he did." Trey was panting, too. "I didn't kill him. Neither did you."

"You fucker, Trey."

"He was in pain," Trey said. "He likely perceived himself as a liability at this point. Do you honestly think he would have survived all the way home?"

Capa shook his head. He looked away and down. At Kaneda's closed eyelids. "No."

* * *

Only when they were in Medical, and their captain was stowed in his cold coffin, and Capa looked at their surviving wounded, did he realize--

_Kaneda used the last of the painkiller on Corrie._

Mace, for now, was out. So was Cassie. But when they woke: like a keening it was, the sound they'd make, a wail, continual and unknowing. They'd lie on their cots and cry from the pain. Like they had every day since--

Capa stared at them. _He used the last of the painkiller._ He gasped around a sob stuck deeply and silently in his throat.

_Oh, Cass._

_Oh, Jesus..._


	3. Chapter 3

Seated at the table in the mess when the fire broke out, Mace had suffered burns to a degree and percentage that did not, according to _Icarus,_ bode well for human survival. His pain made him restless. Almost insensibly so. Like his whole body had become an amputated ghost limb. On their eighth day homebound, he hauled himself silently off his cot and lurched to his feet.

"Mace, you should stay down." Capa spoke flat-voiced from his place at the prep table, where he was laying out fresh air-wrap and cleansers.

"He's right. At least for another day or so." Trey laid off helping Capa. He went to the mechanic, reached to lay his hand on the man's arm-- and Mace gasped harshly:

"Stay away from me, you fucking-- you fuck-- you Goddamn freak." He staggered past Trey as Trey jerked his hand back; he paused, panting, at the door. "God, it's hot in here."

He left. They listened to him move off along the corridor, his retreating steps the shuffle-and-wheeze of an old man.

"I should go after him," Capa said.

Trey shook his head. "You'd probably do him more damage trying to bring him back."

* * *

A handful of hours later, when respect for Mace's pride and pain gave way to concern, Trey approached Capa in the far reaches of the engineering section, where the ship's power plant ground out their motion home from a series of huge gears and pistons straight out of an art-deco yesteryear pragmatic, beautifully tooled, slick with glistening black grease. Capa had had a grim vision of finding Mace mangled to chunks and gristly red pulp amongst these man-tall gears. Later, he would think the truth was worse.

"I found him," Trey said. He was shuddering; his eyes were filled with tears. And his hands: his hands looked as though they'd been scalded or burned.

* * *

Mace stared at Capa with opaque eyes. Rimed-white eyes.

From his coffin. Or display case. His body moved slightly with the nudging of invisible currents. He was facing them, fully submerged, from the aquarium-like structure that housed the mainframe and its coolant.

"He said he was hot," Trey whispered. "He said he felt hot. God, Capa..."

Capa felt his gorge rising. He looked away, stayed silent until the urge to vomit had passed, had re-manifested itself merely as a sheen of clammy sweat on his forehead.

"Let's get him out of there," he said.

* * *

But they couldn't. Even with gloves, protective clothing, or, at Trey's horrible but practical suggestion, a grappling hook intended for EVA use. _Icarus,_ like the arctic oceans of Earth, like the greatest of the Great Lakes of North America, the lake that declared itself superior to all others, near whose pine-forested rocky shores Capa had grown up and whose ice-covered groanings and great booming crackings sometimes haunted his sleep even now, was unwilling to give up her dead. They grabbed, missed. They splashed themselves with the coolant, which clung and burned like a napalm based not on gasoline and fire but on the sheer embodiment of cold. But still Mace-- or what had once been Mace-- avoided rescue.

Capa was sweating. His mind was swimming in agonizing contemplation around coolant burns to his torso, his arms, his hands. He was shaking with exhaustion, frustration, and horror.

"What are we going to do--?"

Trey, panting and sweating, looked back at him in helpless silence.

* * *

_Icarus_ answered for him:

_Present activities in mainframe housing threaten disruption to coolant flow and to mainframe functions. Recommended action: cessation of said activities. Repeat: present activities in mainframe housing threaten disruption to coolant flow and to mainframe functions_--

So they left Mace where he was. They climbed down off the gantry over the coolant tank and staggered out of the mainframe chamber. Away from Mace and the blank white accusation in his opaque eyes.

* * *

When Cassie heard about Mace, she cried. Different it was from the sounds she made out of physical pain. A quiet, hopeless sobbing that managed to cut even more deeply into Capa's heart. He wanted to hold her; he knew that would spell agony for her raw, burned skin. So he settled for tending to her even more carefully, that much more gently.

Until she put an end to that, too. He was cleansing the blistered flesh of her throat when she spoke and he felt as much as heard the words:

"How could you let him go off on his own?"

Her voice was a sandpaper whisper. Capa didn't reply. He could smell her cracked skin, the sickly salt tang of pus and damaged cells. He could feel her eyes on his face, studying him. He heard her tears:

"Am I going to die, too?"

He heard accusation then. And, worse: resignation.

He looked at her, met her eyes. He wanted to tell her the truth: that he saw her only as she'd been before the accident. That she was beautiful to him, that she would always be beautiful to him. That he'd care for her, love her, now and always. But he knew those weren't the things she wanted-- or needed-- to hear. He looked in her dark, hurt eyes. Deep down, he thought he saw trust.

"No," he said. "I won't let you die, Cass."

She looked at him for a long moment. Then, coldly, she said: "Leave me alone."

* * *

Trey cared for her after that. He reported her progress to Capa, murmuring the words like a troubled diplomat who finds himself trapped between powers on the brink of war and who knows that open conflict would for one, if not both, of those powers mean utter destruction.

Capa was listening to Trey's latest report from the bowels of an access hatch outside Comms. It was his turn to have a shot at repairing their external communications. He wasn't having much luck, despite the fact that he'd loaded the system's wiring layout to a data pad and had that pad near at hand. He was hot; he was tangled in wires; he was covered in pine-green insulating grease. Still, he could feel patience, compassion even, as he looked up at Trey, squatting on his haunches at the hatch's edge.

"She'll come around, Trey. She's healing. She'll feel better soon."

"You really think so?"

"Yeah." Capa allowed himself a smile. Just for Trey's benefit, to quiet the hopelessness in the navigator's eyes. "Just wait and see."

* * *

A day later, in retrospect, that smile seemed like hubris.

On that day, Cassie tried to get up. She fell and, in falling, struck and split her burned hide. Capa came running when he heard her scream. By the time he reached her, she was writhing on the deck, as though she could like a snake twist free of her damaged worn skin and, with it, her pain. Capa for a moment stuck himself to the illusion. Then, nearing, he heard her gasping. Whimpering. Tears were running down her raw cheeks. He reached for her--

"No--!" she snarled at him.

Shocked, he scrambled back, away from her. He sat himself timidly on the floor of the medical bay and watched her. She was watching him, and her dark eyes were baleful. Hating him or her pain. Or both.

Either way, it gave her focus. He could see that. He sat there for hours-- it may even have been a day-- while she stared her hatred into him. It broke from her, finally, like a fever. She keened quiet sobs as he lifted her and placed her back on the bed. She drifted off to sleep or unconsciousness while he tended to her.

* * *

_Icarus_ knew which way to go, and their engines were functional. They were on course. So Capa and Trey divided their time between tending to Cassie, the damaged comms system, and the Oxygen Garden. Capa set up a cot in the garden, and, a few days later, when Cassie was stronger, he carried her there. She stayed quiet, being carried, even though Capa must have been hurting her; all that day, she said nothing while he worked on his knees beside her, there in the loam. When he dared to look her way, he could see, though: she was sleeping more peacefully than she had since she'd been hurt. He'd been right: the cool green life of the place was doing her good.

Trey, coming in, ducked past and through the ferns-- primitive and airily beautiful and impervious to inept gardeners like himself and Capa as they were-- and looked at Cassie with gentle concern. "Is she--?"

"Shh." Capa smiled slightly, and then, less slightly, with conviction. For the first time in nearly a month, he felt something like peace. "Yeah."

"That's good." Trey knelt across from Capa, busied himself, as Capa already was, with poking seedlings root-down into the black soft dirt.

They planted for a time in silence. Then Capa said: "We'll have to ask Corrie if this spacing's correct. These seem awfully close together."

"Corrie's dead," Trey countered mildly. He looked Capa's way. "Remember--?"

"Yeah." Capa hesitated--

"I mean, no. No, I didn't remember. Not right away." A blank, burning flare of frustration and grief. He rubbed his temple with the heel of one dirty hand and scowled. "Am I going insane, Trey? How could I forget something like that?"

"Strain. The deployment, the accidents, all the deaths. Man, I'd be more worried if you _weren't_ messed up."

Capa hesitated. He felt he should say something in acknowledgment, but he couldn't speak. He was doubling in on himself. Like dizziness it was. He dug his hands into the damp crumbly dirt and held on. Until that thin covering of dirt over metal tightmeshed decking over shielded insulation over an alloy bulkhead that separated him from the black absolute nothing of space gave him strength, as Earth herself or even the thought of homecoming to that Earth gave him strength.

"You're right," he said. He looked back at Trey. Trey met his eyes in even but comforting acknowledgment. They both went back to planting. Capa felt content.

* * *

His contentment lasted, and, gradually, grain by grain as it were, it grew.

* * *

Until his fall.

* * *

The lights failed two weeks later. He and Trey labored to pinpoint the cause. The pinpointing, at least the more secondary aspects of it, led Capa, armed with a strip of fieldwork light cells, to the second level of the flight deck.

He checked readings. Scanned a newsroom's-worth of monitors for power consumptions, shortages, shorts in the system.

Then, descending the metal-grille steps, he happened in the darkness around his ankles to misangle his left foot. He misstepped. And he fell.

* * *

With the _crack_ but an indirect memory, he lay on his back on the hard grilling of the flight deck's lower section and stared in as-yet-unreceived agony at his left leg. Specifically at that part of his left leg just below the knee. And he thought how white bone looked against flesh. Against blood. Against the dirty powder-blue fabric of his trousers. As white as snow.

And then he heard himself scream in pain.


	4. Chapter 4

He thought at first that Trey had amputated his leg. One blessed second of disconnection between his body and his mind. Then he felt it: a cold, hollow splitting, a booming silent shock of pain, as though the marrow had been dried and chipped from the bone and every nerve in his leg had been left exposed to the air. He gasped at the intensity of it; he felt his body shudder with shock: a manifestation like a block of ice in his stomach, radiating through him in waves--

"Capa?"

Light, to his left. He turned his head toward it, saw Trey's face sickly pale in the glow of the fieldlights.

"T--Trey--"

It was then he realized the rest of him couldn't move. He jerked in panic. He was well beyond the explanatory range of logic, which would have told him to wonder why, if he were paralyzed, he could still feel the pain below his knee. "What's wrong with me--?"

"You're strapped to a gurney," Trey said apologetically. He pressed a palm to Capa's chest, held him steady. "We can't have you moving about while we set your leg. I'm sorry, man: I truly am. We were hoping you'd stay out until we finished."

Capa had stopped several words back.

_"We"? What "we"...?_

Before he could ask, Trey pressed a folded piece of cloth between his teeth.

"Bite down, Capa. We'll do it as fast as we can."

_What "we"...?_

As Trey began to push the splintered bone of his tibia together, Capa thought he knew. He stared past Trey's shoulder. He stared while his body tried to arch. The animal in him panicked and bolted. The straps held him tight. Later, much later, he'd find friction burns and a mottled bluish belt of bruising across his chest.

He thought he was staring at himself. Staring back.

He heard the slurping of his torn flesh as it reabsorbed the fractured bone. He felt as though he were exploding outward from himself, now or a moment earlier. Because--

-- _there he was, behind Trey._ For a moment, he saw clearly with his other self's eyes himself on the gurney staring wildeyed back. He heard from his cloth-stuffed mouth a groan rattling with spit. His heart shook in his chest. The splintered ends of the bone in his leg rubbed against one another, twisted, swayed, snagged and released, snapped in passing, caught and held. All obscenely, all uncertainly--

Capa blacked out.

* * *

He woke when Trey doused the fracture site with disinfectant, a jewel-like blue pouring that glittered in the pale glare of the fieldlights, and then he was conscious only long enough to shout more spittle into the cloth in his mouth.

* * *

When he woke again, the cloth was gone. So was the worst of the pain. But he was shivering. He was sweatsoaked and cold. The thin mattress of the gurney pressed wetly between his shoulder blades.

He heard the sound before he felt the new pain that accompanied it. No surprise there: compared to the agony he'd felt as Trey set his leg, this sensation was nothing. From below his knee it came: a series of jolting taps accompanied by fleshy _thunks._

"Hey," he croaked.

Trey raised his eyes. As the light passed from the dark crown of his hair to his pale skin, his face unveiled itself like the moon coming out of eclipse. He looked at Capa and smiled.

"Hey, Capa. How do you feel, buddy?"

"I'm cold."

"We'll get you onto dry bedding and under blankets as soon as we're done clamping and bracing the fracture site, okay? Don't want that bone popping back out, do we?"

"No, we don't."

It wasn't Capa who replied. He opened his mouth, a silent _Who_--

-- as Cassie stepped into the glow of the fieldlights. She touched Trey's shoulder as Capa stared; she said: "I can finish up here, Trey."

"It's all yours." Trey straightened, handed her the autostitcher. "Hell, you have to be better at this than I am." He looked sheepishly from her to Capa. "Think I've been going in zig-zags with that damned thing."

"It doesn't look that bad," Cassie said, kneeling, looking closely at Capa's leg.

"I'll leave you to it, then. Let me know if you need any help. I'm going to see what I can see on the flight deck. Then I'll have a shot at getting the lights back on."

Capa, still staring, whispered, "Thank you, Trey."

Trey nodded with weary good humor. He unclipped a glowing cell from the fieldstrip and walked off into the blackness, almost immediately no longer visible as himself. Just a bobbing handful of light he was. Then that, too, vanished.

* * *

He lay for what felt like a very long time simply listening to the _thunk_ of the autostitcher. He couldn't look at her. He was _afraid_ to look at her. Not out of revulsion at her healing burns, but out of terror at a thought, a conviction: _If I look at her, she'll vanish. I'm imagining this._ (As pain in solid taps jolted his broken leg.) _She isn't really here. She's_--

"Capa?" Cassie gently squeezed his thigh, just above his left knee: he felt her fingers pressing against his flesh. "Capa, are you alright?"

"Y-- yeah." He swallowed enough of his fear to turn his eyes to her. Then he swallowed again, around pain that tightened his throat. "Looks pretty bad, doesn't it?"

"It's okay." She kept her hand on his thigh as she smiled a ghost of her gentle, bright smile. "I've seen your bony knees before, you know."

* * *

Despite the disinfectant, the fracture became infected. Capa descended into fever, then into delirium. He had long, rambling, incoherent talks with Kaneda, who sat silently by his bedside and who sometimes peeled away his face and stared at Capa with naked protruding eyeballs while Capa shouted with fear and knew him to be Death. Corazon occasionally joined them: she'd step from the blackness into the patch of light that held Capa and his cot, and she would stand unbreathingly beside him and pick maggots from the cracks in her charred skin and place them on him, on his chest and arms, and they'd burrow into him, and Capa could feel them moving beneath his skin. He clawed at himself to get them out. He cried; he screamed himself hoarse. He sweated in hellish heat; he shuddered with cold--

* * *

He woke up. He opened his eyes. Blackness pushed into his sockets. Still, something in him had the presence of mind to ask:

"Why is it so dark? I thought Trey was going to fix the lights."

"He has." Cassie's voice, to his left. Cassie's hand-- he'd know her touch anywhere-- on his left shoulder. "You've been sick, baby."

"My eyes--"

"Your eyes are fine. You just need to focus. Look at me, Capa."

"I can't--"

"Of course you can, sweetie." Her hand cupped itself against Capa's cheek. "Look at me."

He did. He saw her face, and all the pain, all the stress, the accident, the horror and strain caught up to him. He looked at her, and he started to cry. Great gulping, wracking, hopeless sobs.

"I'm so sorry, Cass--"

"Capa, shh--" She stroked his hair gently. "It's okay."

Angel that she was, she waited with him, patiently, silently, while grief drained from him like a toxin, until he could speak without choking.

"I never meant to doubt you."

"I know."

"It won't happen again, I swear."

"I believe you."

"I love you," he said.

She kissed his dry lips. "I love you, too." Another kiss, her lips warm and soft on his forehead. "Go back to sleep. I'll be nearby if you need anything."

He watched her straighten away from him. She was wearing a pale blue t-shirt, worn but not frayed, and her Spitfire charm hung on its silver chain like a crucifix against her sternum. As the tears subsided from his eyes, he looked from the tiny gleaming wings to her neck, then higher to her face. Her scars had faded. He hadn't noticed when he first opened his eyes. Staring didn't bring them back now. They were gone.

"Must be a trick of the light," he whispered.

"Hm?" Cassie smiled, her brows and brown eyes bemused. "What's that--?"

And her hair had grown back. She had it pulled back into a ponytail. As she often wore it. Just as she was wearing it the night she--

"How long was I out?" Capa asked.

"Too long." Again she touched his face. She stroked his cheek, and he could hear his stubble rasp against her fingertips. In her eyes he could see a darkness as of past sorrow; he saw tears as well. "I thought I'd lost you."

He smiled for her. "Never."

* * *

He closed his eyes, still seeing her smile in return. He slept.

* * *

When next he woke, a fresh set of realizations: Medical looked cleaner. His leg was barely aching, just a sort of reminder-throb that kept time with his heart. He was dressed in a clean green t-shirt and his boxers, but that would do for now. No immediate need to stand on formality. To stand on anything, for that matter: the pain in his leg might not be crippling, but he was willing to wait for help from his medical team before he tried to get up. He was still tired, too. He realized that when he propped himself higher against his pillow and the room briefly blurred around him.

It refocused as Trey walked in. He smiled when he saw Capa. "Hey, she wasn't kidding. Welcome back."

"Thanks." Capa nodded toward the ceiling. "Good job on the lights."

"Fortunately, I'm not as bad at reading electrical schematics as I am at reading maps," Trey replied. He added quickly, when Capa looked alarmed: "That was a joke, by the way."

"Got it." The words slurred slightly in his mouth. Dizziness: a slow, sandcrawl wave of it. Capa let his head fall back on the pillow.

Trey came nearer, his expression concerned. "You okay?"

"Just tired."

"Get you anything? Water--?"

"Not right now, Trey. Thanks."

_Thanksh,_ he said. As if he were intoxicated. Or as if time were slowing. _NoshtrytnowTreythanksh._

Trey's fingers squeezed his shoulder, and Capa focused on that: the contact. Tried to. He was dozing off--

"You hang in there, Capa. You hear me? It won't be long now. We'll be home before you know it."

Capa smiled. It sounded as though time were slowing for Trey, too.

"That's good."

He closed his eyes. For a moment he wondered if the light beyond his lids was still there for the seeing. Somehow, though, it didn't seem important. Not right now. He was healing; Cassie and Trey were with him. They were going home.

He slept.


	5. Chapter 5

Taylor was outside the _Shostakovich_, recalibrating the farthest-spaceward sensor array on the station the World Space Administration had placed nearest Earth's neighbors in the inner solar system. What this translated to, for the rotating staff of fifteen men and women who populated the _Shostakovich_ at any given time, was a sixteen-day commute to a shift lasting from six to sixteen weeks. Taylor, a rangy, craggy, sandy-haired man too tall to fit comfortably in a WorSpAd standard-issue suit, was well into the last week of an eight-week stint.

"Got something to help you celebrate, George," Douglas had said, seven hours earlier. John Douglas, station commander, was half a head or better shorter than Taylor, but he had a bulldog's frame packed with muscle across the chest and shoulders, and he was known throughout the admin as a decent guy. But he had devilish blue eyes, too, and a bastard sense of humor backing them up.

Taylor said: "Sensor array?"

"I need to remind you how you're best qualified, we're lucky you're here, et cetera, et cetera...?"

"Naw. Save me a hit off that bottle of Glenmorangie you've got stashed. That'll do."

As one of the station's suit wranglers helped him wedge himself into his EVA gear, Taylor listened to Douglas make the shift announcements. Last up was news of the spacewalk, the manual recalibration of the station's outermost sensor array, to be performed by Taylor and Alan Gorecki, the station's comms specialist. Taylor caught the last of it just before his wrangler sealed his helmet.

_Means we'll be temporarily forgoing our role as Earth's earliest early warning system_, Douglas was saying, over the intercom. _The Venusians show up today, we'll never know until Control shuttles out our pink slips._

Now, outside, Taylor was standing by with a lamp watching Gorecki finish the last of the finest fine-tuning when he felt a tingling at the back of his neck. A nerve-tickle, like spiders' feet. He turned himself around. His mouth dropped open.

It was a ship. A huge ship, moving at speed. She was a mile long if she was an inch. A spindle bulked with living modules at her midsection. She flashed by. He knew she was moving faster than an avalanche, and he could imagine her roaring like one. But this was space, and the ship was absolutely silent--

He shook himself. "Alan, look."

Even through the armor of Gorecki's suit, Taylor could see the man start at being interrupted. One of the blessings of EVA work, and one of the dangers, too: the solitude enfolded you. Once you were able to filter out the chatter over your helmet feed, it was just you and your work. Nearly a waking dreamstate. The techs, like Gorecki, were more prone to it than the general mechanics, spacehounds like Taylor, which was why Douglas had acted wisely in pairing them up.

Now Gorecki turned, too, beside Taylor, and stared at the ship, and as Taylor called over his helmet feed to Douglas to get to the nearest starboard view out, fast, Gorecki cut in--

"Look." He raised his suited arm, pointed.

The mystery ship was towing a shield. A metal-paneled parabolic dish over a mile in width, if Taylor's guess was at all accurate. In space it's difficult to estimate size and distance: no atmosphere, no points of comparison. Only absence or presence. The ship had missed them. It had missed the _Shostakovich_. The shield might, too. Just barely--

He thought all this in under three seconds.

Then he remembered where he and Gorecki were. On the outer sensor array. That much nearer the avalanche.

He looked, and his heart jolted in his chest. He saw the inner edge of the shield like his own private moon. A silent unreal dirty white crescent rushing right at him. He grabbed Gorecki's suited arm.

"Let's go--!"

Taylor unclipped the tether from his suit, turned away, and punched in his suit boosters.

The edge of the shield missed him by five meters. It missed his tether by two. It didn't miss the sensor array, which snapped away and shattered like carmelized sugar. And it didn't miss Gorecki.

A soft grunt over Taylor's helmet speakers. A sharp crunch. Then silence from Gorecki's feed. Taylor couldn't see him, once he'd countered and slowed his own rocketing motion away from the station and the ship: the shield had scooped Gorecki up and carried him away.

* * *

When Taylor got himself back inside the _Shostakovich_, Douglas was keeping his people calm and on-task. They had atmosphere and power, and at least that damned ghost ship hadn't taken out their communications. Douglas nodded in frowning acknowledgment to Taylor as Taylor entered the command deck.

"Call the Russians," the commander was telling his comms officer. "Ask 'em if they've got any SOSes in this sector."

Asked Arkin, a dark-haired young guy and Douglas's too-new second-in-command: "Why?"

"Because if she's on autopilot and Control can't raise her computer, they're gonna need help slowing her down."

He didn't bother barking at the kid for something Arkin should have known. Douglas had been around long enough to know that one of the primary rules of command in space was conservation of resources. SOS: the Russians called it "small-object survey"; everyone else called it "salvage." After the _Icarus_ missions had effectively stripped Earth of her fissionable materials, there'd sprung up a black-market demand-- despite all the affirmative rhetoric about new sources of clean, safe power-- for said materials. Asteroids seemed a possibility, if, literally, a distant one. So, while the governments of Earth locked horns over the details of international property rights regarding huge pieces of property that were not, in fact, of the Earth, the Russo-Indian Alliance had sidestepped the debate through clever phrasing and had built and commissioned the SOS fleet. Survey ships that just happened to be tough enough to crack heads with asteroids, to wrangle meteors, and to extract whatever materials thorough research might require, be that material rock or soil samples-- or, perhaps, the odd bit of uranium, the occasional boulder of sapphire, a ton of gold or silver now and again.

"Sir, it's the Russians," said Douglas's comms officer. _Speak of the devil_, Taylor thought. "S.O.S. _Natascha_. Wants to know if they can be of assistance."

"Tell them yes," Douglas replied. "But tell their captain that it's _nyet_ on the 'survey' rights."

He turned to Taylor as the message went out to the _Natascha_. "You got the best look at her, George. She was gone before most of us made it to the window. What do we tell Control?"

Taylor was still numb. Shock, his flight, the chill from the suitwork itself. He'd been checking the details in his mind against his first, instinctual identification of the ship. He was a thoughtful man, a seasoned astronaut. Only when he was certain did he reply:

"Tell them it's the _Icarus II,_ inbound from the sun. She's on her way home."

* * *

The problem, then and two weeks later, as Daniel Monroe stood in his capacity as Project Icarus advisor observing and listening on the command deck of Space Station _Kubrick_, was an ironic one: the ship that had ensured the continuing survival of humanity was now rocketing like a missile toward the very planet she had saved, the beautiful blue globe spinning in space below them.

He was listening, now, to the chatter coming over the channels the tenders used. Nothing from the _Icarus II_ herself: setting aside for a moment the question of whether any of her crew were still alive, she wasn't transmitting. Her comms were down. No radio signal, not even her call sign.

Which is where the tenders came in. While Control tried desperately to establish enough contact with her computer to tell her to take her engines offline, a swarm of tough, tiny ships was working alongside the _Icarus_, fixing at reinforced points on her hull remote-controlled boosters that might be used to alter the ship's headlong course. A second group of tenders flew at a safe distance alongside the _Icarus._ These tenders carried magnetized mines. If the boosters failed, the mines would destroy humanity's savior before she could fall to Earth.

Monroe looked at the feed coming from the forward camera of one of the tenders. She still looked deceptively delicate, he thought, the _Icarus II_. Even moreso now, for the three years she'd been away. Wear to her hull from heat, cold, scoring from micro-meteorites and dust. Curt Bowman, the _Kubrick_'s sensible, quiet commander, had asked Monroe the most obvious question when Monroe had arrived two days ago and they'd looked together the first images of the _Icarus_, transmitted back from the Russo-Indian survey vessel that at the time had been trying to get grapplers onto the ship's hull:

"Wouldn't she burn up in the atmosphere?"

"Break up. Not burn up. Not completely." Monroe pointed at the great metallic dome now trailing at the _Icarus_'s stern. "That shield is meant to withstand solar-atmosphere heat, let alone anything Earth's atmosphere can generate. The ship herself is plated for higher-than-normal temperatures. If she falls, structurally she'll pull apart. But the pieces will be intact when they hit."

"You realize," Bowman said quietly, "this could mean destroying the most famous ship in human history."

"Better that than her taking out New York, London, or Hong Kong on her way down, don't you think?"

He'd felt his first real inklings of despair then, for the ship and her crew. He'd come to know all of them during their orientation and training. He'd played chess with Kaneda, the mission's captain, and with their physicist, Robert Capa, the crew's youngest member, who hid his shyness and a sly, friendly sense of humor behind a chilly genius front. Their botanist, Corazon, was the unflappably brilliant poker player that Mace, their mechanic, only imagined himself to be. All of them were good people, truly decent people.

Now Monroe found himself bracing for the worst. In less than six hours, the _Icarus_ would be too near Earth. She would be nearly within touching distance of the _Kubrick_ or one of the _Kubrick_'s sister stations. Then those mastering the remote boosters would cede control to those who held the triggering codes of the magnetized mines dotting the _Icarus_'s hull and shield, and the most famous ship in human history would cease to exist.

* * *

With forty-seven minutes to go, a comp tech aboard the _Kubrick_, using a channel that spoke to a subsystem well below the sophistication of the _Icarus_'s artificial intelligence, got through to what remained of the ship's computer. Two minutes later, the ship's engines shut down, and the remote boosters steered her clear of Earth.

* * *

It took another two days, nearly, to turn the ship and angle her into docking position at her original high-orbit build platform. Then the first rescue-and-recovery team cracked the seal on her airlock and went inside.

* * *

No lights. Stale air. And a smell. Animal, feral, deathly. Rotting, too, from where she was. Zoe Rueda angled her torchbeam up at the wall fans in the oxygen garden of the _Icarus II_, over the stands of ferns collapsed and dead or dying from lack of light. Only two of the fans were spinning, and then only slowly, laboriously.

_Rueda._

She touched her comm bar. "Rueda here."

_Sullivan, ma'am. We're in Medical. We've got bodies here._

Beside her, Jason Bose, Rueda's burly field partner, paused in mid-step. He was looking out over his torch beam, toward the dark second level of the garden, where the botanist's and physicist's offices would have been.

"How many?" Rueda asked. She kept her eyes on Bose, looked where his dark eyes were looking.

_Six. We think. It's hard to tell, ma'am. A couple of them are really messed up._

Now Bose was stepping away from her through the debris in the garden, picking his way toward the steps leading to the second level.

"Record your findings, Sully, and continue your sweep. Rueda out."

She had just moved to follow Bose when they heard it. A rustling sound, a dragging. It stopped when Rueda tuned her ears to it. Water, condensed from the ship's air- and equipment-cooling systems, was still dripping over a steel table at the chamber's far end. But that's not what she-- or Bose-- had heard.

"There's something alive in here," Bose said.

* * *

They found him in the physicist's office, folded in on his pale, skeletal self on the floor in the corner farthest from the door. One filthy, starved survivor. A badly healed fracture to his left leg. From beneath a snarled matting of dark hair, he stared at Rueda and Bose with eyes of crystal blue. More specifically, he stared at the lights they carried.

Robert Capa stared at their lights. Then he started to scream.


	6. Chapter 6

Beside homely Jack Leonidas, pathologist and mortuary scientist for the Icarus Project, Monroe stood under under bright all-seeing light in a room of white walls and chrome looking down at a human body. Blackened flesh under a crisp white sheet. Burnt red, staled to brown, hints of weathered gray: what was once raw now dead. The remains of a young woman's face. Her eyes were closed. Monroe was grateful for that.

"The year has not been kind to Lieutenant Cassidy," Leonidas said, his gruff voice soft. Monroe glanced at him, the lines in the man's gargoyle face working in quiet sadness, then let his eyes drift to the monitor showing Cassidy's personal information, her picture. One of the loveliest girls he'd ever seen. Open, delicate face, dark eyes and hair. Monroe looked away from the screen.

"Cause of death, Jack?"

"Suffocation."

Monroe turned to him with a perplexed frown. Leonidas took it as a cue to lead Monroe out of the mortuary and back to his office; Monroe was only too willing to follow him. Not that Cassidy was the most horrific of the mission's casualties: Searle and Harvey had been the most terribly burned, and had likely died instantly. Mace had suffered the most grotesque fate: after more than ten months suspended in the coolant housing the ship's mainframe, his body had begun to dissolve, ice crystals forming around skin and flesh tearing away in hoarfrost shreds. On their way to Leonidas's office, they passed the secondary path lab, where techs were performing confirmational DNA testing on samples taken from the body unofficially identified as Trey's. By count and logic, the corpse they had was his, but it was missing most of its head.

"Blast panel caught him when the fire broke out, we're guessing," Leonidas had said, apologetically, watching as Monroe, looking at the body, fought to keep his breakfast in his stomach. "We found skull fragments and what we think is brain tissue on the deck near the galley freezer. Poor bastard. Three more feet, and he could have gotten inside. Might've saved himself."

Now, however, they were in Leonidas's office, and Leonidas was handing Monroe a mug of coffee. Monoe sipped, a shudder running between his shoulder blades, while Leonidas called up the pathology report on Cassidy.

"Fabric fibers stuck to the skin of her face, inside her nostrils," he said. He pointed with a coarse finger at a microscopic strand magnified to the size and gnarled roughness of a twig. "Matches the fabric used for the ship's bedding. My guess is Dr. Capa suffocated her with her pillow."

"My God--"

"They were out of painkiller, probably had been for days." Leonidas's voice was unaccusing. "We found one bottle's worth in Corazon; the survey team found the rest on the floor in Medical." He looked at Monroe. "In my opinion, he did her a favor."

Monroe said nothing. He finished his coffee, his eyes on the screen. His hands were shaking.

* * *

"So he murdered her," said Jeff Lasky.

En route to the last stop in the parade of horrors that constituted the mission's followup, Monroe looked with open, sick disgust at the director of Project Icarus. They were walking down a corridor of slate-gray walls, nocturnal lighting.

"Suffocated her," Monroe countered, tightly. "There's a difference."

Lasky's watery blue eyes caught the light in cruel mischief. "I don't see how."

They came to a double set of doors, a keypad glowing in pale green on the wall to the right. Monroe punched in an access code, and the doors swung slowly open, toward them.

"Their last messages home imply that Capa and Cassidy were lovers," he said. "You make the connection."

Lasky passed him, went through the doors. A moment later, at the observation window, he said: "Well, he certainly doesn't look like a murderer. Nor, for that matter, like much of a savior, either."

Joining him, Monroe thought _I could kill you, you son of a bitch._ He looked at the window.

What he saw beyond, he saw only through the grace of the latest in light-sensing technology. The room in which Robert Capa lay was pitch dark. They had him in restraints on a hospital bed; they'd cleaned him, under sedation, and tended to the terrible fracture in his left leg as best they could. They'd dressed him in a hospital gown and run IVs to his bony arms. At his healthiest, he'd been slender; now he was skeleton-thin. He lay unmoving, watching the darkness.

"Why is he in the dark?" Lasky asked.

"Light phobia," Monroe replied. "The woman heading up the rescue team had the sense to recognize it. She said he screamed until they switched off their torches."

"Is he under sedation now?"

"Minimal," said a woman's voice.

Monroe started. Julie Macmahrlahan, the project's primary physician, was standing beside him. She was tall and dark-haired, and she moved with the silent grace of a praying mantis.

"Doctor," Monroe said.

"Doctor," she said in reply. Her green eyes, clear even in this light, strayed coldly to Lasky. "We can't give him much of anything. He's suffered damage to his heart, liver, and kidneys. From self-medicating, we think. For the pain from his leg. The best we can do is to keep him quiet."

"And fed." Lasky nodded with satisfaction. "At least we're not looking at a total loss in terms of public relations. How soon until he's on his feet?"

Macmahrlahan exchanged looks with Monroe, and, but for the professional sorrow in her expression, he might have wondered whether they were blocking one another from attacking Lasky bodily and outright.

"We're not certain at this time that that's an option, Dr. Lasky."

Lasky looked at her incredulously. "You're not saying that he's going to _die_--"

"I'm not saying that he's going to live." Macmahrlahan spoke quietly and carefully. "Dr. Capa is a very sick man."

"Well, just keep him fed and medicated, and we'll--"

"That may not be an option either, sir," Monroe said. "You've seen his personal directives."

"I've seen them."

"No artificial means of sustenance--"

"I said I've seen Dr. Capa's directives, Dr. Monroe." The water in Lasky's pale eyes was now as hard as ice. "And I know his parents died six months ago. Car crash, wasn't it--?"

"Which makes his older sister his power-of-attorney," Monroe said. "I've already contacted her."

Lasky looked at him with surprise and unconcealed anger. He had, at least, grace enough to internalize his sputter.

"Forgive me, sir," Monroe added dryly. "I assumed you would approve."

* * *

He met with her on a jagged spring day. Ice crisp and brittle over puddles, over mud. Leaf buds like tiny artichokes huddled on wet black branches. At first glimpse, Rosa Fischer looked nothing like her brother. Mostly, it was the eyes: Robert Capa's were wide and strikingly blue; his sister's eyes were a thoughtful shade of hazel in a pale, thin, clean-featured face. She wore a light gray tweeded coat against the lingering chill, dark slacks, boots. No gloves, no hat over her long dark hair. He thought, first seeing her, that she might start crying, a worn sort of grief that would flow from her on a wash of tears. He found the idea unthreatening.

"Mrs. Fischer? How do you do? I'm Dan Monroe."

He offered her his hand.

* * *

Rosa took it. She studied his face calmly.

You can wear grief like armor. Some people don't realize that. Doctor Monroe, she could see, was one of those people.

"Call me Rosa," she said. She smiled slightly, reassuringly, saying it. She hoped she didn't sound too much like what she was-- that is to say, a recently divorced woman. The world saved, armageddon averted, salvation at hand, and here she was: one of the many who'd suppressed personal irritations and desires for so long that they'd been nearly overwhelmed by frustration and anger once the world's crisis passed. Selflessness becoming selfishness overnight, her husband had called it. She hadn't argued. It's easy to be a martyr when being a martyr seems the only choice, when death is the only path available. When you realize your arm's not off, though, you're free to feel the sting of the paper cuts. She and Alex reached their crisis five months ago, after she'd returned from Michigan and her parents' funerals-- an amiable split: equal property rights, shared custody. She had yet to return to her maiden name. Right now, it would seem too much like cashing in on her brother's glory.

* * *

She stood at the observation window, Drs. Monroe and Macmahrlahan flanking her, and looked at said brother's breathing remains. His cheeks were sunken, his skin sallow even in the artificial light. She could see the bones in his wrists and hands, restrained at his sides by straps a hundred times too strong for the task. His eyes were closed.

He'd killed Cassidy.

* * *

"Cassie and I--"

She saw him now as he'd been then, revealing his intimate transgressions to her in a message from forty million miles away. She could read the happiness in his eyes; she'd smiled, silently projecting suggestions--

_Screwed? Made love? Fucked like bunnies?_

-- as he paused, hovered over his next words--

"-- Umm--"

Like a choose-your-own-adventure even his most coherent messages were. Or one of those puzzles where you added a noun here, a verb there, an adjective. She wondered how many tries it had taken him to come even this close to confessing. She studied him for clues. No missing teeth, as revealed in white even flashes beyond his full lips. No scratches or bruises, above the neck, at any rate. Ostensibly, Cassidy had acquiesced to the encounter, likely even enjoyed it outright. Rosa in her message back would have to ask-- and then chuckle, imagining his blush.

* * *

When he was ten years old, he'd come within inches of being diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. Too quiet, too shy, too inwardly focused. Their mother, a field medical technician for the Michigan State Police, would have none of it.

"He just needs to find himself, that's all," she said.

Rosa tramped along with him when he went out looking. Hours out in all weather, walking through the woods that surrounded their house on the Upper Peninsula. Rain, mud, or snow. The occasional clear day, the fragments of sky through the branches the color of his eyes. Decked out in blaze orange during hunting season-- and as delicately as a deer he'd pause, his nostrils flaring slightly, as he frowned in the direction of every echoing _pop_ of a rifle-shot. Rosa thought at the time, watching him-- she spent their hikes not only absorbing cold, gray, sodden nature but composing in her head stories (some of which, even now, had boosted her onto the lower rungs of bestseller lists in Australia and North America)-- that he seemed to resent not the interruption of his thoughts but the interruption of life itself. Not romantically, not poetically: pragmatically. He could see patterns where the rest of them saw chaos; Rosa knew that.

Their mother knew it, too. When they returned from a ramble, she'd ask, without a hint of sarcasm: "Are all the leaves present and accounted for, Robert?"

And Robert would smile his shy, tooth-hiding smile.

* * *

He added, suddenly-- his message-self added, confessing his tender tryst with Cassidy: "Don't tell Mom."

And Rosa had laughed.

* * *

She asked, glancing at the pages sitting before her on the visitor's side of Dr. Macmahrlahan's desk: "Are these treatment papers?"

"Commitment papers, Rosa."

She didn't look up. "He's not coming back, is he?"

"Not anytime soon, no."

* * *

She didn't hate Monroe, even after he explained it. The armor of grief, you see: you feel as though you'll never feel anything again. And he was a good, kind man, Monroe was. He couldn't help it. Dr. Lasky was a cold bastard, little more than a sturgeon with legs, primeval, narrow-minded, and vicious, but Monroe was every bit the burly bear of a fellow Robert had described him as. She sat back, away from herself, as he told her what her brother had gone through, and tried to imagine his brown eyes twinkling, tried to picture him smiling, his broad cheeks dimpling as he did. Distancing herself.

"Three of them died instantly when the fire broke out. Searle, Harvey, Trey. We think that Captain Kaneda assisted Dr. Corazon in killing herself before he-- The tests indicate he asphyxiated, likely in the main airlock."

He paused; he reached for his mug of coffee. Those ever-present, ever-comforting mugs. Rosa reached for hers, too, sipped, then cradled the heavy warm ceramic against her chest. Monroe continued:

"Mace-- their chief mechanic-- he wound up in the mainframe coolant. Delirious, probably. Shock and pain. He drowned there, and Dr. Capa was unable to extricate him. His efforts to do so damaged the mainframe; said damage was compounded as-- as--" He cleared his throat, took another swallow of his coffee. "The coolant is corrosive to human flesh, you see. Mace was immersed in it for a year or better."

"A contaminant," Rosa said softly.

"Yes. It damaged the circuits for, among other things, the ship's lighting. Estimating from ship's stores, Dr. Capa had field lighting to last for two months. As for oxygen, Dr. Corazon's final reports estimate enough air for one-quarter of their return trip. That is to say, air enough for eight people. So when the lights failed and the ferns began to die, there was still oxygen enough for--"

Rosa asked: "How long were the lights out?"

"Eleven months. Approximately."

"After he killed Cassie." After he saw the rest of his crewmates burned alive, suffocated, crushed, and drowned. After he suffered a compound fracture just below the knee of his left leg. After he began to medicate himself against the pain of what he'd seen and what he felt, eventually taking pills blindly-- literally-- from the cabinet in Medical.

She asked Monroe: "Did he ever tell you why he became a physicist?"

"He might have." Monroe's expressive heavy brows bowed in a mild frown. "I'm sorry; I don't remember."

"It's alright." Rosa looked calmly at the coffee remaining in her mug. "He told me once that he wanted to work with light because he was afraid of the dark."

* * *

He never came back.

* * *

She allowed them to feed him, against his written and recorded wishes, for two months.

Two months and a day later, she was at his side where he lay in the darkness of his room. It was well after-hours; they were alone. In her right hand she held a hypodermic.

* * *

He talked, sometime, to Cassidy and Trey. Rambling discussions about the ship, the mission, encouragement regarding the long voyage home. _Not long now._ Tender whisperings to his injured love, healing and helping him to heal in turn. He wasn't talking now. Rosa stood beside his bed and by the depth and slowness of his ragged breathing knew him to be asleep.

He was dying. She'd known it in the tallying of his ribs, the rattle like dry leaves in his chest. She noted it now out of simple observation and sadness, not guilt, as she injected the contents of the syringe into his right bicep. She set the empty syringe on the table near his bed-- she had the room mapped in her mind, to the inch-- and stretched out beside him.

* * *

"Pinch to wake the dreamer, Cass?"

"Hmm...?" she asked softly.

Capa tipped his head closer to hers, the scent of roses in her soft dark hair.

"Fell asleep on the shuttle, didn't I?"

"Yes, you did."

"Sun'll be up soon, won't it?"

"Mm hm."

"Do you mind if I-- I'm still feeling tired."

"It's okay. Go back to sleep, darling. I'll wake you when it's time."

Capa smiled. "It'll be beautiful, won't it?" he whispered.

"Yes, it will."

* * *

She held him until he slept, and after that she held him until he stopped breathing. She held him until the last bit of life shuddered out of his sunken chest. She held him until his body was still with the absolute stillness of death, until his skin was cool beneath her touch. She held Capa until he was safely on his way, until the sun was rising and he was watching it rise with Cassidy at his side.

Rosa held her brother Robert until he died. Then she went home.

**THE END**


End file.
